Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Co-creator Stephen Trask on how musical theatre sensation relates to all

Stephen Trask has seen it all.

Trask, who is non-binary and goes by the pronouns they/them, wrote the music and lyrics and co-created subversive rock musical theatre sensation Hedwig and the Angry Inch almost three decades ago and in that time, they have seen how the show has affected those in the audience.

“We saw a lot of couples that were at a certain point in their relationship (come to the show), and they either get really close to each other and very often we’d find out, that’s when they became engaged, and we’d see couples break up,” they told The Nightly.

One of those splits was a relative of theirs. It was during Hedwig’s original run off-Broadway at the Jane Street Theatre in 1998.

“I remember going up to the dressing room and Miriam Shor (who played the character of Yitzhak) said, ‘Did anyone notice that little grumpy balding guy who just seemed to hate the whole thing and he’s with this beautiful woman and they just looked miserable together, and were sitting further and further apart?’,” they recalled.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s my cousin and her boyfriend’. I went out with them afterwards and we had dinner together and she told me, ‘I’m breaking up with him tomorrow’. People would go to the show and you could literally watch people make life choices.”

Trask’s cousin’s story is not that of Hedwig, a genderqueer East German singer who finds acceptance through a journey from Berlin to the US, via a sex change operation, two husbands and thwarted artistic ambition.

“But what we all have in common is we have to make it from being babies to being elderly and find happiness and find what makes us fulfilled,” Trask added.

Trask was in Australia for the first time to celebrate the Sydney run of the latest local production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has already stormed through Adelaide and Melbourne.

On opening night on Saturday, Trask joined the cast onstage for a special encore of The Origin of Love, strumming the guitar like it was an appendage. They were a rock star up there and the audience loved it.

“From the beginning, I had a great feeling about this production – and the more and more it develops, it feels like what they’re doing is very true to what we originally created and very new at the same time,” they said.

“We’re not very big on making people mimic us, and some people want to and sometimes they don’t. Like a rock song, there are a lot of ways you can cover it, and you can do your own version that feels true but different.”

They and co-creator John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote the book, tried out their material for Hedwig at New York City’s drag-punk club Squeezebox in 1994, and in the three decades since, the show has been played all over the world in small venues and grand theatres from Tokyo to Turkey.

The exuberant Hedwig debuted in London’s West End in 2000, was adapted into a film in 2001 but didn’t transfer to Broadway until 2014 with Neil Patrick Harris in the role, followed by musical luminaries including Andrew Rannells, Michael C. Hall, Taye Diggs, Darren Criss, and even Mitchell, who originated the character in 1998.

It took 16 years to jump the 40 or so blocks to Broadway, but after Hedwig’s success globally, it had “reached a point where it had no choice but to go to Broadway,” Trask said.

“The fact of it being on Broadway, being celebrated and then getting nominated for and winning all those Tonys, having this big star be in it and just be dynamite, the show had earned it.

“But it also felt like the culture had advanced in some way, so you could celebrate all that queerness on stage in a big Broadway house.”

But the celebrity-laden roster was also what led to that run’s eventual end in late 2015. They couldn’t book anyone for longer than 12 weeks at a time and audiences were expecting a big name. It was ultimately too exhausting to repeat the cycle of recruitment, training and rehearsals.

Trask has also worked in Hollywood, composing for a bunch of films including The Station Agent, The Savages and Dreamgirls, although when they moved to Kentucky for their husband’s job, Trask borrowed their agent’s address to get a Los Angeles area-code for their mobile number (“A Kentucky area code is just not acceptable”).

Every time they booked a big job, they would buy another piece of equipment for their studio – it started off sparse and now Trask can barely walk in.

The move to Kentucky was a perspective change. “I used to chase money jobs and do a lot of them at some point,” they said. “I just didn’t like it, and it affected my relationship to music.”

One instructive experience was the 2004 movie Meet the Fockers, which ended up being 10 months of Trask’s life – “That was a difficult movie, everyone was fighting with everybody, and I kind of backed out of the Hollywood thing after that because it was emotionally taxing.”

If they stayed in that lane, “I would’ve hated my life but I would be really rich”. Now, Trask has a balance of money jobs that allows them to keep going into their studio and do “whatever the hell I want”.

That’s the foundation of Hedwig, to be true to yourself, no matter what your experiences are.

“This woman talked to me about how her mum left El Salvador, and walked on foot to Los Angeles,” they recalled. “She starts every day by listening to Hedwig and she says, ‘I am Hedwig’.

“She’s a school teacher, she’s not an artist and not genderqueer or non-binary or gender non-conforming in some way, but she says, ‘I am Hedwig’.

“Because she’s that person who figured it out, worked like hell to find a way to make her life happy, went through all this stuff, survived, put herself back together again. She found strength in the songs.”

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is playing at Sydney’s Carriageworks